Integrated vulnerability inspection post-inspection review

Published on: 19 February 2021

Publication types: Revisit

Police Forces: Cleveland

Summary

Between 2017 and 2019, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire Rescue Services (HMICFRS) carried out three inspections of Cleveland Police:

A common strand in the findings from these inspections is the force’s ability to protect vulnerable people, including children. Between the three reports, we gave the force two causes of concern, along with multiple recommendations and areas for improvement.

Background

In November 2020, we returned to review the progress the force has made in responding to the open recommendations from all three inspections that specifically relate to how the force protects vulnerable people.

This is a bespoke inspection of how the force is responding to, assessing, safeguarding, investigating, and protecting vulnerable victims. This is the first time that we have brought together multiple types of inspection to review the progress the force is making in a single area. The review included:

  • an examination of force policies, strategies, and other documents;
  • an audit of calls, incident logs and case files, including child protection cases and vulnerable adult cases, that related specifically to the areas for improvement set out in the previous inspection reports (this audit looked at case files from June to August 2020);
  • interviews with officers and staff; and
  • some ‘reality testing’ of the force’s processes and speaking to those some staff doing this work where this could be done remotely without extracting them from their work.

This inspection took place during the COVID-19 lockdown period and the force provided remote access to incident and crime recording systems, investigation files, telephone recordings and body-worn video footage.

This report outlines our findings from our 2020 post-inspection review.

Get the report

Integrated vulnerability inspection post-inspection review (PDF document)

Get the press release

Cleveland police is improving the way it protects vulnerable people, but concerns remain.